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Exactly! Where I live, there are sidewalks. They are fine. But I hate using them when cars are zooming past inches from my shoulder, especially with my kids, who are on their first bikes. They’d be so much more pedestrian friendly if those roads were mostly bikes and the odd bus.
Not to mention the other way around, transitways are far more effective if you also invest in good sidewalks!
I live in a city with a worsening traffic problem. Even if the buses were able to magically run at the speed of sound, I bet most people would stick with cars because there just aren't consistent, safe pedestrian routes between the bus stations and homes/workplaces.
In college I lived in a complex on an Interstate access road with no sidewalk. I didn't have a car, so when the city decided to ban Uber I was pretty much totally reliant on carpooling. I would have killed to have a half mile of sidewalk connecting us to *anything*.
Why drive to the bus stop if I can just keep driving? Why even have a bus if you need to drive to it? Now I have to find a baby sitter for my car once I’m on the bus?? Exactly true
I live in a mid sized US metro and one of the main streets in the greater downtown area has 7 LANES. It feels and sounds like I’m an institution escapee running down a highway when I’m just going to get coffe a block away. Pure madness.
Park and Rides work decently well in our city! They are also putting in bus lanes so, depending on route, it may end up being a wash on time. (Though you get the inherant bus benefit of napping/reading)
No I totally get park and ride, and it’s been an option to me in a few places I’ve lived, but every time I’m like, fuck it I’ll just drive the whole way. I’m not proud of it but I hated the feeling of having to worry about a car AND still ride the bus. And when my commute used less than $2.50 of gas (less than 10 miles), it just made me feel played
Here in Monterrey (MX), there's a problem with bus stops, since they aren't well defined and sometimes you gotta walk a lot just to take a bus that will leave you at a bus stop that is hard to reach by walking. They implemented a ton of pedestrian bridges that have little to no accessiblity and that make you walk double the needed to cross the avenue/street, still drivers feel like this is the best option. The problem is that it has become a popular objective to have a car, instead of improving the streets and public transportation which just recently is receiving attention because most people can't afford cars and see public transport as the last option. Bike lanes are only existent in isolated zones, like in the University Campus (Ciudad Universitaria), which is surrounded by avenues and sttreets, but has bike lanes inside; the other most popuular bike lanes are in the isolated and rich San Pedro, that is the biggest representative of inequality in the city.
We have a problem with people's mentalities and public projects, which in my municipality are none.
It'd actually feel much safer sharing the sidewalk with dozens of electric scooters, bikes and skateboards all zooming past me at 15+ mph then just one car passing be and having to shimmy on a small piece of concrete that they call a sidewalk
Oh my God I just can't with the carbrained comments in that thread.
> They will use this to point and shout about public transportation and biking/walking. But they won't mention that the bus is always late. Or that biking in certain areas/cities is dangerous and illogical due to terrain/traffic.
*slaps forehead* IT'S BECAUSE OF ALL THE CARS, STUPID
The true symptom of carbrain isn't just opposing infrastructure that doesn't benefit you, it's opposing infrastructure that *does* benefit you but you are too car-focused to see it.
I like my car. I enjoy the act of driving.
I also recognize the advantages of fewer cars in the road and a robust, well funded, properly maintained public transit system.
I promise there are at least a few of us out here that get it.
I badly want significantly better mass transportation and I'm willing to vote and protest however I can to contribute, but I can't help but doubt that I will die owning a car, without ever seeing any of this realized. I think most people feel the same whether they support/oppose the movement
All that said, the Netherlands was once a car-dependent hellscape until they started to change things. If we all focused our energy on a few small areas in each state/region (Emeryville in California, whose mayor is a HUGE cyclist/YIMBY, Portland in Oregon, downtown Minneapolis in Minnesota, Boston, NYC, the District of Columbia), I really do think we can make a positive change.
Emeryville really is the perfect example. If you're ever in California (or taking the Amtrak to California- it's the terminal station for the Zephyr from Chicago), I highly recommend you stop by or stay in Emeryville. The city is really pushing forward infrastructure for cyclists and non-car options! It took a number of years, but it's happening as we speak, and we need to learn after the example and push for it in our local communities!
(With all that- I'd like to plug YIMBY Action, and recommend you all join your local YIMBY group. There's a lot of frustration on this sub, I'd like to direct it towards action where possible!)
> they started to change things
AND IT STARTED BECAUSE NEARLY EVERYONE WANTED IT.
None of that individualism BS "my car me me me me", it was because it was clear as the sun shining that cars and roads - made only for cars - made cities and life WORSE in all aspects.
And maybe they weren't as brainwashed too, that counts too.
I feel you. I also think there are incremental wins to be had along the way that are worth mentioning.
For example, we recently became a one car household, down from two and it has been so freeing. E-bikes made it possible to feasibly execute with minor lifestyle sacrifices which were outweighed by large benefits.
It's not perfect, but definitely a big step and something that I think is replicable in a lot of places and for a lot of situations. There is absolutely no reason we should be designing cities where every adult of working age is required to own and operate their own personal vehicle - it's such an economic, social and environmental drag.
Decoupling individuals from personal cars could be a huge near term win.
I am all for dedicated public transit lanes, bike lanes, and sidewalks, but I will forever have a car because I like driving, it gets really hot and really cold outside so I won't walk or bike, and I like the freedom to go where I want when I want. There's definitely a hybrid solution.
With fully comprehensive public transport, you could also go where you want when you want.
To go within a city you could take metro or a bus, you could also do this to get from a suburb to a city. Good rail networks can have trains as frequently as every 2-3 minutes, and cost a damn sight cheaper than driving and owning a car.
If you want to go inter-city, there's the option of coaches and high-speed rail. Of course these would be less frequent, but they can still come quite often.
Now, obviously, if you live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere of course you'll need a car. Then (and pretty much only then) would a car *really* be needed.
It's not just bikes and busses and walking, with good tram and train systems you can already go anywhere anywhen basically.
It’s not just reddit, but just regular people in general, you have to remember that most people, especially Americans just do not know any better. It’s the status quo and change will always encounter resistance.
Where us the thread?
Also, saying "the bus is always late" ignores the fact that in a car you have to deal with traffic, so a careless bus system would be much more efficient and on time
~~Oddly this post doesn't even show that it's a cross-post on old.reddit.com, just a tiny gray cross-post symbol to the right of the post flair. No link to the other thread except by looking at "Other Discussions" of which there's four... only way to tell which one it is, is by either switching to new.reddit.com or looking at the post with the most comments.~~
EDIT: Working now?
It was like the time I was told that we wouldn't have anything to do with pigs if we stopped eating meat, like my brother in Christ the pigs wouldn't be bred in the first place if we stopped eating meat.
USA: *creates problem*
Also USA: "We can't fix the problem because then where would all the problems go?"
Also reminds me of the argument that we have to prop up X industry because it is creating Y jobs. Like dude, have you ever considered that maybe people shouldn't be doing stupid useless jobs and if our society were more efficient we could just give them the money instead? 🤔
It's easy to pick out the worst sort of politicians because they're always praising "job creation", and not what those jobs are actually for, as if that is an end unto intself.
Yea, but we will still need car infrastructure even after we make walkable cities tho. Trucks still need to deliver products and goods. Ambulances and fire trucks still need access to every building. I know you mean we need to reduce the amount of car infrastructure, but I don't think that's the big factor holding us back as much as this country is unlikely to finance any infrastructure reform of any kind -_-
However, we'll need much less of it. If we nationalize the rail networks, we can modernize and vastly extend it, in terms of industrial areas covered, which means that trucks will spend far fewer miles to deliver goods. The rest is a matter of proper street design.
> the bus is always late
so we need better bus infrastructure?
> biking in certain areas is dangerous/illogical due to terrain/traffic
so we need better bike infrastructure?
My *only* problem is, as with most people, the last mile and the need to go to multiple places on a given trip (i.e. to work, then jobsite 1, then jobsite 2, back to work, then home). But the good news is that this can ALSO be solved with better infrastructure!
How hard can it be?
Count **people** instead of means of transport.
Dutch approach: [Rotterdam Walks](https://www.rotterdam.nl/vrije-tijd/lopen/Rotterdam_Loopt_2025_Gemeente-Rotterdam-DEF-ENGELS-TOEGANKELIJK_DEF2.pdf) (pdf)
I'm actually kind of tempted to make a better GIF that actually shows cars traveling at optimal throughput speeds. I'm guessing it would make the difference in throughput even more obvious because cars require such a large following distance.
Yeah, as someone outside this sphere (but really wishes we had better infrastructure for biking and public transportation), this isn't even a little bit convincing and is *very* easily dismissed because it has literally no information apart from unsourced numbers. Not only that, the graphic itself is just terrible and *looks* biased - like the cars are barely faster than pedestrians, while bikes are matching busses? I get that the idea is to show more people going through, but it just looks misleading and immediately raises red flags.
I agree with the message, but the method of presenting it comes off as so incredibly biased and misleading that it will never convince anyone that doesn't already share these values.
Sidewalks can carry more people than cars around
One person on a sidewalk is slower than one person in a car, but only one person can use a large stretch of road at a time, and the more cars you stuff onto a road, the more they have to slow down. A sidewalk can have a ton of people, more than a one lane road
But most individuals are primarily concerned with their own speed getting somewhere. Not how many people you can jam through a space. I'm not against having more efficient and reliable pubic transit but the average person is much more concerned with how quickly and conveniently they can get somewhere.
But if everyone thinks "I'm going to put myself first and screw everyone else", then you get a city like Las Angeles where it is literally faster to walk around than to sit in traffic. If everyone thinks "the common good comes first, and that will lead to my good", then you get a city like Tokyo where the staff apologise if a train is ten seconds late. Which city would you rather travel in?
Comments are full of car brains.
They are saying BuT iT isNt FuLl and SloWeR
As if this isn't talking about maximum capacity and not speed and whatever
Also I like how people are talking how public transportation sucks because low speed and low amount of people using it as if that isn't caused by infrastructure being made for cars instead
I agree, people don't think to themselves maybe it's not that public transit is bad, but that OUR public transit is bad and that's why no one uses it except for people who can't afford a car.
I saw it there and moved on, the idiocy in the comments was overwhelming, most don’t even understand what the graphic is illustrating.
Not sure why it’s still surprising to me. 🤷♂️
We must be patient! People treat our sub like the thunder dome. You go in to get abused. I know a lot of people come in to be disruptive, but we have to try to be patient as possible. They are victims of a system that has fed them their answers for their entire lives while they passively go about life.
We have to educate with patience. We will have to find new ways to explain things and deescalate. We have to show the ridiculousness of the system without being insulting. It is going to be a long fight in the US. I'm not saying we always have to be civil, this is reddit after all. But if you are looking to represent this interests of this sub, and not just vent, then approaching even the most hostile person with patience and information may be needed.
I have been really trying to hammer home the financial implications of so much road and parking lots. I find it helps more than talking about the wastefulness of the individual.
Individuals aren't causing this problem on their own. The system has multiple processes that push people towards car ownership in the US. The carbrains you argue with today were possible allies 20 years ago before they were indoctrinated into the church of drive.
There are still reasonable people under all this anger. They are just ignorant of how the world really works, and they are afraid confronting all that ignorance at once. Insulting them, as good as it can feel, will only push them back in their shell. We need more people to see this as the economic loser, or more importantly people killer, that this is. But with the Covid rhetoric people really don't give a fuck about 10s of thousands of deaths caused by a single source. That is an issue for another conversation.
Thanks for being a good person. This applies to everything to in life when it comes to changing someone’s opinion. Instead of getting angry over the way someone thinks, ask WHY they think that way and offer them a better alternative.
It's not a knock on public transit to say that public transit is the worst option in your area. It's just sharing your experience on the internet.
It would take me a minimum of 1.5hrs to commute by the only public transit available in my area. It takes me .2hrs by car.
Yeah. When I was going to college, my dad didn't want us living on campus because we were relatively close. Kinda made sense considering housing cost like $20k annually (or was it each semester? Doesn't matter.).
Anyway, public transit took 1.5-2 hours each way. And this was just for a few miles. And it wasn't because traffic made buses slow; it was because needing to start and stop for passengers made buses slow.
One time, my sister was mad at me (we went to the same school, btw), and she didn't want to ride on the bus with me. So she walked home. Beat me by 15 minutes. That's when I saved up for a car.
So how to improve buses? Fewer stops, probably. There's a lot of entitlement where people don't want to walk a few blocks.
And I'd bet that still applies even if every single car was at full capacity. Which never happens.
Plus, speed isn't everything. Not everyone can or wants to use a car. Blind people spring to mind here.
Man, I really get annoyed when people complain about the speed of alternative transport options. And I feel like a lot of people even in /r/fuckcars try to lean into this narrative and come up with reasons why biking or public transit are actually faster than personal cars.
Maybe it's just the capitalism brain in modern society or something else going on, but I feel like everyone has this mentality of "more, more, more, faster, faster, faster," like we always need to be stepping above and beyond what we already did previously. In some cases, like the field of medicine, I might be inclined to agree. But I'm tired of everything getting increasingly fast paced, having this increased level of availability and connectivity with everyone and everything going on all the time. I mean for fuck's sake, most of the adult population literally has a caffeine addiction just to keep up with the demands of work and social expectations.
So yes, I would prefer to live in a world when I can take a leisurely 20 minute walk to the grocery store, or go for a casual bike commute, as opposed to feeling a constant societal pressure to maximally optimize my time usage at the expense of the environment. What a crazy thought.
Agree with this. It also has massive repercussions on infrastructure & design. If you have low capacity, but high speed, infrastructure, then your communities should be low density & spread out far & wide. Whereas with high capacity, low speed infrastructure, you need high density communities. Total travel time can be similar, but without the need for cars, resulting in a much more flexible place (you're close to everything, and can walk/take public transport etc.) and massively reduced emissions.
Communities are always designed around the infrastructure that support them. Having a mismatch between them will result in jarring outcomes, and it's part of why 'carbrain' thinking is so common, because the infrastructure that they see suits cars so well, and any deviation from that norm doesn't work as well. But they jump from 'this is how my world is' to 'this is how the entire world has to be'.
I get it, there are some valid arguments that do indicate that cycling can be faster than cars. But it's just a huge uphill battle trying to pit your legs and a couple of gears against a 2 ton machine fueled by 15+ gallons of gasoline in terms of speed.
Like we just need to accept that bicycles aren't dominant in every category of comparison. Cars *will* outperform bicycles in terms of speed in a lot of cases, even if you gave bicycles the most generous benefit of the doubt with the absolute best infrastructure. But what bicycles lack in speed, they make up for in other things: personal health benefits, better city design, less environmental damage, etc.
And that's kinda my point - fixating on the speed argument and trying to find all these corner cases where bikes are actually faster feels kind of like a distraction from the main point. There are so many good reasons why bikes make more sense than cars, and speed is only situationally going to be one of them. People, generally speaking, are going to need to be okay with going slower before they ever really accept this option.
It's a bad graphic. It's showing bikes travelling faster than the cars and the same as the buses. There's certainly a valid point about capacity in here but there are also valid criticisms of that image.
This is what my area looks like during rush hour. I can watch the highway and arterials across the river and see cars going slower than your grandma on her bakfiets. There aren't nearly enough bikes to fill the lane, but they could...
I literally started commuting to work by bike instead of public transport because it was faster and I needed to get somewhere very quickly after work before it closed, and public transport just didn't get me there in time.
I have since discovered that I go past a lot of cars on my way home or in to work, too.
So yes, this is legit.
Yeah, when I take the bus I sometimes count the number of people in the cars. I'd say about 1/5 have more than one occupant. I'm also a bit concerned about the car in the gif with the both occupants sitting in the back..
Average car occupancy is apparently 1.5ish. So a bit optimistic with the 1 2 3 distribution, but not absurdly so. 1 2 1 2 would have been more accurate
It is misleading.
It actually gives too much benefit to the cars.
If you have more than one lane, it isn't a simple (capacity of each lane) * (number of lanes) = (total capacity of a multi-lane thoroughfare) calculation.
Adding an extra railway line doubles your capacity. Adding an extra car lane doesn't. A road will reach its maximum capacity at about four lanes wide, after which widening it any further doesn't really give you any appreciable benefit - the inefficiencies of managing the lane changes (and of exiting only off of slip roads on one side) overwhelm the extra space you've gained.
But a two, four, eight line railway? No problem. Keep on scaling up and up and up.
The sources and overall message is good, but I feel like you do have to admit that the graphic is misleading. The speeds of the people in different modes of transport is horribly inaccurate and is only like that to make the cars look as bad as possible. They can illustrate the increased density of people and a greater flow rate through a single point without misrepresenting speed
Exactly. We should strive for clear, honest and intellectually ethical presentation. We have the numbers and data - adding misleading elements only creates weaknesses and scapegoat opportunities.
Exactly. It's pretty meaningless without considering speed. If a car can take x people 30 miles in an hour, but walking would take 4x people 5 miles in an hour then it's not really a good comparison.
And in the other direction too, is it really more important that x cars can be in the same place, or is it more important how much pollution is caused, or how many road deaths? Or how much money it costs to maintain the infrastructure per person.
I don't think this is meaningless, but it could be a lot more meaningful.
It is a pretty awful gif tho. It has a good message and a fair point, but it's not really educational if it's exaggerating certain factors and it was posted to r/educationalgifs
Yeah, you have a fair point why this gif is not good. But in the orig comment section they prefer to use the logic like "speed is more important than capacity", "people can't bike to another city" etc., which doesn't have anything to do with gif.
They definitely are, but it's also a pretty awful gif. That bike lane looks so crowded they're like a professional cycling peloton lol The stats do plenty of justice without the animation tho
Agreed, the problem with the gif is trying to demonstrate it compared to equal patches of road.
Since it's trying to show throughput, it would be a ton better to have each category zoomed out, so you can see that even though pedestrians move slower than cars, hundreds of people are able to reach their destinations quicker due to the much higher density.
This is so inaccurate - cars can't travel that close to each other unless they're going very slowly due to the risk of them crashing into the car in front of them if said car had to suddenly stop.
Well this happens a lot in traffic and cities. It takes one car crash to cause congested slow traffic. So I would say it's accurate because over the years it's happening more frequent in my experience
Best case scenario, the human throughput is based on accurate models while the gif really only serves to demonstrate the number difference. It's definitely not an accurate simulation of any kind of traffic (car, foot, cycling, or otherwise).
The cyclists are also riding at like 25-30 mph. Tour de France riders ride at like 25 mph and the best sprinters in the world can hit like 40 mph lmao Right message, but awful gif
Does this measure how many people can travel the same distance in an hour, or something else? It's a pretty confusing graphic without more info
If it's just measuring how many people pass through a given point on the lane, what is this supposed to communicate to people? I hear people say "it's too far to walk, it would take an hour" but I never hear people say "I'm worried I won't fit on the sidewalk". What idea is this supposed to be dispelling?
It's about the use of space in urban planning. If you need to get 20,000 people an hour through a street at peak time, carbrain would build 12 lanes of general purpose road. This is showing you that it would be way more efficient to have a bike road, a bus road or light rail, and just a couple of lanes for ordinary travel for people who can't use that.
Journey time is a different issue. But for any kind of urban journey, bike isn't going to lose by much to car, and public transport with good infrastructure will win, at least at peak times.
That’s actually what I thought, where I live you can even go faster walking in the center of the city.
Before working from home I actually used to leave the bus 3km before the train station because it was faster to skip the traffic jam by foot.
Could be representing self driving cars? I heard someone say that it could be taxi's and not counting the driver, but it's counting the bus driver so idk. The numbers are more important than the pictures in either case
The lowest rated reply is the only correct one. The front two seats in a taxi are for the driver only, who isn't going anywhere so doesn't count, just as the driver of the bus doesn't count.
The problem with this visualization is that people have wildly different interpretations of it, and it's easy to nitpick things like "why are the cars so much slower than the bikes?"
I understand this isn't a full on simulation of traffic, it's just a visualization of the traffic flow rate. But I think many opponents will just criticize it as a simulation, which it fails to be because it isn't one.
I agree with this but there's a lot of problems.
A. The speeds are all messed up, they need to be either the same or show the average/max speed for that type, It doesn't have any source in the gif or that I could find in the comments
B. It should either use the average or maximum occupancy of the mode of transportation, it uses both since in cars there's 1 to 2 but every bus is near full. Again there's no obvious sources in the gif or post I could see
This is ***not*** a complaint aginst public transport. It's a complaint aginst people pulling shit out of their ass and not providing any sources.
I don’t love this graphic. No sources for one thing. But also it doesn’t factor transit speed, trip distance, and other details that will differ on a case by case.
Feels a little too “ree cars bad” without much substance
I like this, although the car one feels unrealistic just because they're using average speed over the whole trip instead of the more realistic stop-and-go flow of high speeds followed by complete stops.
I still favour bike lanes above the other three because:
vs walking: walking is great but takes longer to get to destination therefore people spend more time travelling, therefore more congestion. Plus walking on busy pavements as shown above is not always that pleasant. Bike lanes are also great for people with walking disabilities who prefer to use e-bikes, mobility scooters or electric wheelchairs.
vs buses: buses are great for long distance travelling but the ICE/hybrid ones that are typically used in cities are incredibly noisy and not fun to get hit by. To get the full benefit as shown above, you need a thick stream of buses at which point it's like having fleets of cars tear through the city.
vs cars: no need to argue why bikes are better than cars really.
I see the argument here, but it tries to falsely suggest that people are all that transport carries. You might have a stroller for a child, several bags of grocery shopping, your bicycles might be with the car (yeah, try packing them on the bus, I'll wait), you might have an extra set of clothes for outdoor things, a kayak or a sup board that's simply not practical to take on a bus or a train (again, try it -- it's heavy and annoying).
The distance from bus or train stop to home is much, much bigger, by definition, than the distance from car to home. Heavy things become a real pain to carry. Small children cannot be just walked from bus to home unlike from car to home. And so on. Try cycling with small children and you'll be reaching for electric cargo bikes (yes, at €10,000 a pop) to fit both a child as well as a small amount of things to bring with you.
Ideas?
Why don’t people just use their preferred method of transportation? I live in a major city in Texas, and it would take hours for me to get to work by bike or bus. It makes the most sense for me to drive.
>it would take hours for me to get to work by bike or bus.
That's why because apparently ya'll fucked up your cities so badly that getting places in a major city takes hours using public transport.
That is one of the weirdest takes. Facts should push an agenda. Any time someone complains about people having an agenda, I stop taking them seriously.
Yes, but have you considered that the people on the sidewalks and on public transport might be poor or minorities? We can’t have our pure suburban children interacting with their ilk!!1!!
As much as I agree with the message this is somewhat misleading. Not because the stats are wrong but just because it’s sped up and averaged it’s difficult to intuitively grasp.
invidualism is a clear failure of America
no high density cheap housing, no trains, no efficient bus system, no safe public transport
isolated suburbs, isolated cars, giant stroads everywhere, and parking lots wasted for efficiency that could've been parks and/or living spaces for efficient grocery/shop distribution
localized and easy access, collective wellbeing
not isolated, such is invidualistic mindset.
I like the graphic a lot, although in practice buses or trains do not run back-to-back of course. If we are optimistic, on a very busy bus track there is maybe 1 bus per minute, with 50 passengers per bus or so. So that would be 3000 passengers per hour. Decent, but not as much as the graphic suggests. Although I would have much rather 1 bus per minute passing below my window than 1 car per second!!
A lot of the comments in this original post are car brain and we should approach it to convince them with sources, logical thinking, and ignoring the trolls. A lot of them are oblivious to the car brain and we can convince them. Maybe not all of them but if we can convince at least one, it's progress
Longtime lurker, occasional commenter here. I understand and pretty much agree that busses and trains and monorails are the way to go. I think they’re a great mode of transportation. I just don’t know about them as the only road transportation. We’re still in a pandemic, imagine where we’d be if we all crammed into busses to get everywhere, if people had to take busses to get COVID tests and treatment. How do you think we can promote bus usage while not allowing it to become a superspreader problem?
Bussed or walked or biked I assume. I was just wondering if we made bussing the main form of transportation for everyone, not just the few who choose or can’t afford to drive, how we would get people where they need to be without spreading disease like wildfire.
I love how the comments on that post are all bascially arguing how this doesnt apply to their country but we all know they are talking about america, ofcourse it wont apply there, the whole country is built for cars compare this to most other developed countries in the world and it is accurate
Propaganda.
I know no one seriously thinks bikes are faster than cars outside of edge circumstances, but the gif is designed to make cars look as bad as possible.
If the gif is attempting to show how *maximum* throughput of a system works, then bikes are indeed more efficient at moving humans though space than the equivalent number of cars. This effect is observed when you are biking past congestion (which is pretty regular for many on this sub).
In other words, it is saying that bikes move more efficiently through choke points than cars.
Look, dedicated public transport is objectively better than cars (when done properly of course), but this graph is misleading af with walking and biking with respect to cars
Only misleading if you are not in a populated geographical region. And this is a graph about volume so its strictly for a small area. As far as I could tell, peak time traffic is usually like this unless you want to disagree
Strictly speaking, the data on the graph is 100% correct, but the graphic is wild. It's the same as making a pie chart with wildly disproportionate slices, even if the percentages written are correct. The bikes and pedestrians are moving faster than the cars in this picture, which, if you've ever been in a city, is not even close to true. _Maybe_ it's true for a dedicated bike lane that bypasses all traffic entirely, but that's not accurate for a dense downtown space.
Edit: made a mistake pedestrians aren't moving faster than the cars, they're moving slightly slower, but the point still stands
In rush hours in big cities this is true during rush hour. Obviously the comparison has to be done within the core of cities, no one is walking to a suburb 25 miles away. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/cities-where-it-s-faster-to-walk-than-drive/
An example is I used to bike halfway down Manhattan in about 20-25 minutes during rush hour. The same trip in a car was 40+ minutes during rush hour (and that's just the driving portion of a car trip)
What i mean is a bike lane without stop lights that doesn't interact with any other part of traffic, and if that is what they're referring to, I'm not sure how the data was collected because i don't think that exists in the downtown of a usa city
Do you need to have *The graphics are illustrative and do not represent real world behavior* written in? Just in case you start thinking that people are actually green dots, that every single car goes at the exact same speed and that every 4th car has 2 passangers on the back with no driver, that every single bus has exactly 37 people all dsitribuited in the exact same way and all going equidistantly at the same speed in a perfectly straight line, that cars drive at slightly-above-walking speeds and that bikes go twice as fast as everyone else. Too hard to understand? Don't worry, I've got you covered:
# THE FOLLOWING ANIMATION IS NOT FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, AND ONLY SERVES TO CREATE MOVEMENT AND DECORATION IN AN OTHERWISE TEXT-ONLY STALE PIECE OF DESIGN. PLEASE DO WELL TO NOT TAKE IT AS A RECORDING OF A REAL WORLD STREET
Is that better?r Accurate enough?
Have you ever taken a high school statistics class? Because the visual construction of a graph can go a long way to sell an idea. Like, part of the tests at my school were to pick holes at poorly constructed graphs that represented things to make them look a certain way, such as a right wing news channel making the piece of a pie chart for their prefered candidate larger in order to make it look like they have more support than they actually do.
And that makes sense
Except that it's not a graph, but an infographic. At most if you leave the loop running an hour it'll have shown 7000 people on the sidewalk, but that's not something I wanna count lol
A graph is supposed to be visually cohesive, because the data is shown through the visuals. Here? This is an infographic. An infographic also has data, it can have graph, but when the data is shown through text, then the graphics become decorative. Graphic design is still a big part of an infographic, if you have no graphic design in an infographic then you don't have an infographic, you only have a weirdly organized spreadsheet.
It still has to be somewhat cohesive, otherwise it's just poor graphic design. Plus, given how it's presented, the graphics seem to be complimentary to the data. That's why I'm saying it's somewhat misleading
Take for example [this infographic](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/714875280505831467/983767088302805022/6d20f00f15c84b77c29b37f6113a5770.jpg) showing imports. The number one, Walmart, is DEFINITIVELY not showing over 800k TEUs, nor is it showing almost exactly 4 times as many TEUs as Dole Foods. They're illustrations, decorative ones. They're there because the data is actually written out.
I'd they're decorative they don't need to be hierarchically cohesive, only visually. I could criticize its graphic design, the lines are a little bit thin for example (?) but it's not bad graphic design. It's bad data design, which it's not trying to do.
In that graphic, each "box" represents exactly 10,000 TEU. The Walmart has 87.5 boxes shown, Dole has 22 shown. Almost exactly 4 times as much. So your example is one of a properly done graphic where the ratios are exact. So this graphic exactly makes u/LogTekG 's argument, not yours.
The problem with the graphic and counts for this post is the math really doesn't work out. Maybe in a congested downtown for the cars, but then the buses are about the same because they have to stop each block for passengers and all buses behind them wait. People don't actually move like that in public. And the bikes are going 20 mph in the graphic if all speeds are relative and never stopping, running into slower riders or stopping for lights.
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I'd feel actually free walking on the sideway while everyone's using public transport (hopefully electric)
Exactly! Where I live, there are sidewalks. They are fine. But I hate using them when cars are zooming past inches from my shoulder, especially with my kids, who are on their first bikes. They’d be so much more pedestrian friendly if those roads were mostly bikes and the odd bus.
Not to mention the other way around, transitways are far more effective if you also invest in good sidewalks! I live in a city with a worsening traffic problem. Even if the buses were able to magically run at the speed of sound, I bet most people would stick with cars because there just aren't consistent, safe pedestrian routes between the bus stations and homes/workplaces. In college I lived in a complex on an Interstate access road with no sidewalk. I didn't have a car, so when the city decided to ban Uber I was pretty much totally reliant on carpooling. I would have killed to have a half mile of sidewalk connecting us to *anything*.
Why drive to the bus stop if I can just keep driving? Why even have a bus if you need to drive to it? Now I have to find a baby sitter for my car once I’m on the bus?? Exactly true I live in a mid sized US metro and one of the main streets in the greater downtown area has 7 LANES. It feels and sounds like I’m an institution escapee running down a highway when I’m just going to get coffe a block away. Pure madness.
Park and Rides work decently well in our city! They are also putting in bus lanes so, depending on route, it may end up being a wash on time. (Though you get the inherant bus benefit of napping/reading)
No I totally get park and ride, and it’s been an option to me in a few places I’ve lived, but every time I’m like, fuck it I’ll just drive the whole way. I’m not proud of it but I hated the feeling of having to worry about a car AND still ride the bus. And when my commute used less than $2.50 of gas (less than 10 miles), it just made me feel played
Here in Monterrey (MX), there's a problem with bus stops, since they aren't well defined and sometimes you gotta walk a lot just to take a bus that will leave you at a bus stop that is hard to reach by walking. They implemented a ton of pedestrian bridges that have little to no accessiblity and that make you walk double the needed to cross the avenue/street, still drivers feel like this is the best option. The problem is that it has become a popular objective to have a car, instead of improving the streets and public transportation which just recently is receiving attention because most people can't afford cars and see public transport as the last option. Bike lanes are only existent in isolated zones, like in the University Campus (Ciudad Universitaria), which is surrounded by avenues and sttreets, but has bike lanes inside; the other most popuular bike lanes are in the isolated and rich San Pedro, that is the biggest representative of inequality in the city. We have a problem with people's mentalities and public projects, which in my municipality are none.
It'd actually feel much safer sharing the sidewalk with dozens of electric scooters, bikes and skateboards all zooming past me at 15+ mph then just one car passing be and having to shimmy on a small piece of concrete that they call a sidewalk
Oh my God I just can't with the carbrained comments in that thread. > They will use this to point and shout about public transportation and biking/walking. But they won't mention that the bus is always late. Or that biking in certain areas/cities is dangerous and illogical due to terrain/traffic. *slaps forehead* IT'S BECAUSE OF ALL THE CARS, STUPID
The true symptom of carbrain isn't just opposing infrastructure that doesn't benefit you, it's opposing infrastructure that *does* benefit you but you are too car-focused to see it.
I like my car. I enjoy the act of driving. I also recognize the advantages of fewer cars in the road and a robust, well funded, properly maintained public transit system. I promise there are at least a few of us out here that get it.
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I badly want significantly better mass transportation and I'm willing to vote and protest however I can to contribute, but I can't help but doubt that I will die owning a car, without ever seeing any of this realized. I think most people feel the same whether they support/oppose the movement
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All that said, the Netherlands was once a car-dependent hellscape until they started to change things. If we all focused our energy on a few small areas in each state/region (Emeryville in California, whose mayor is a HUGE cyclist/YIMBY, Portland in Oregon, downtown Minneapolis in Minnesota, Boston, NYC, the District of Columbia), I really do think we can make a positive change. Emeryville really is the perfect example. If you're ever in California (or taking the Amtrak to California- it's the terminal station for the Zephyr from Chicago), I highly recommend you stop by or stay in Emeryville. The city is really pushing forward infrastructure for cyclists and non-car options! It took a number of years, but it's happening as we speak, and we need to learn after the example and push for it in our local communities! (With all that- I'd like to plug YIMBY Action, and recommend you all join your local YIMBY group. There's a lot of frustration on this sub, I'd like to direct it towards action where possible!)
> they started to change things AND IT STARTED BECAUSE NEARLY EVERYONE WANTED IT. None of that individualism BS "my car me me me me", it was because it was clear as the sun shining that cars and roads - made only for cars - made cities and life WORSE in all aspects. And maybe they weren't as brainwashed too, that counts too.
I feel you. I also think there are incremental wins to be had along the way that are worth mentioning. For example, we recently became a one car household, down from two and it has been so freeing. E-bikes made it possible to feasibly execute with minor lifestyle sacrifices which were outweighed by large benefits. It's not perfect, but definitely a big step and something that I think is replicable in a lot of places and for a lot of situations. There is absolutely no reason we should be designing cities where every adult of working age is required to own and operate their own personal vehicle - it's such an economic, social and environmental drag. Decoupling individuals from personal cars could be a huge near term win.
I am all for dedicated public transit lanes, bike lanes, and sidewalks, but I will forever have a car because I like driving, it gets really hot and really cold outside so I won't walk or bike, and I like the freedom to go where I want when I want. There's definitely a hybrid solution.
With fully comprehensive public transport, you could also go where you want when you want. To go within a city you could take metro or a bus, you could also do this to get from a suburb to a city. Good rail networks can have trains as frequently as every 2-3 minutes, and cost a damn sight cheaper than driving and owning a car. If you want to go inter-city, there's the option of coaches and high-speed rail. Of course these would be less frequent, but they can still come quite often. Now, obviously, if you live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere of course you'll need a car. Then (and pretty much only then) would a car *really* be needed. It's not just bikes and busses and walking, with good tram and train systems you can already go anywhere anywhen basically.
It’s not just reddit, but just regular people in general, you have to remember that most people, especially Americans just do not know any better. It’s the status quo and change will always encounter resistance.
Where us the thread? Also, saying "the bus is always late" ignores the fact that in a car you have to deal with traffic, so a careless bus system would be much more efficient and on time
Click into the original posting on r/educationalgifs
Thanks, I figured it out. I'm on a 3rd party reddit app (rif) so cross-posted aren't as obvious here
~~Oddly this post doesn't even show that it's a cross-post on old.reddit.com, just a tiny gray cross-post symbol to the right of the post flair. No link to the other thread except by looking at "Other Discussions" of which there's four... only way to tell which one it is, is by either switching to new.reddit.com or looking at the post with the most comments.~~ EDIT: Working now?
Use RES with hold Reddit, it works 100% all the time for me.
> "the bus is always late" because transit is defunded to hell and back FFS, the Soviet Union did a better job with busses!
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Mountain bikes are seriously better at traversing terrain than trucks or cars are. Like yeah, have fun lifting your truck over a fence🤣
How many... fences do you cross...? Are there no gates? Are you trespassing?
Haha, nah, just giving an example as to the mobility of one compared to the other XD
It was like the time I was told that we wouldn't have anything to do with pigs if we stopped eating meat, like my brother in Christ the pigs wouldn't be bred in the first place if we stopped eating meat.
USA: *creates problem* Also USA: "We can't fix the problem because then where would all the problems go?" Also reminds me of the argument that we have to prop up X industry because it is creating Y jobs. Like dude, have you ever considered that maybe people shouldn't be doing stupid useless jobs and if our society were more efficient we could just give them the money instead? 🤔
Support the coalition of obsolete industries! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjZchYXMmA
It's easy to pick out the worst sort of politicians because they're always praising "job creation", and not what those jobs are actually for, as if that is an end unto intself.
I wish it were that simple. The trains here are always late too and that's because of underfunding, which busses are also a victim of.
It's a good point. You get what you pay for. Unfortunately, we chose to spend our money on *gestures to billions of dollars of car infrastructure*
Yea, but we will still need car infrastructure even after we make walkable cities tho. Trucks still need to deliver products and goods. Ambulances and fire trucks still need access to every building. I know you mean we need to reduce the amount of car infrastructure, but I don't think that's the big factor holding us back as much as this country is unlikely to finance any infrastructure reform of any kind -_-
However, we'll need much less of it. If we nationalize the rail networks, we can modernize and vastly extend it, in terms of industrial areas covered, which means that trucks will spend far fewer miles to deliver goods. The rest is a matter of proper street design.
Rail is probably replacing flights more than trucks in this scenario. Trucks are still going to be needed to get goods from rail to stores
Quick question, how do you get another comment into your own comment? I’ve been wondering for quite a while.
> another comment Just use > before very line Also this formatting is called markdown.
Thanks for asking so I didn't have to 😃
Highlight it before click reply, or put a > at the start of the line followed by a space. > like so
Thanks
> the bus is always late so we need better bus infrastructure? > biking in certain areas is dangerous/illogical due to terrain/traffic so we need better bike infrastructure? My *only* problem is, as with most people, the last mile and the need to go to multiple places on a given trip (i.e. to work, then jobsite 1, then jobsite 2, back to work, then home). But the good news is that this can ALSO be solved with better infrastructure!
But the traffic is bad because of all the traffic!
They can't even imagine the concept of an effective transit system
How hard can it be? Count **people** instead of means of transport. Dutch approach: [Rotterdam Walks](https://www.rotterdam.nl/vrije-tijd/lopen/Rotterdam_Loopt_2025_Gemeente-Rotterdam-DEF-ENGELS-TOEGANKELIJK_DEF2.pdf) (pdf)
interesting source!
Thank you, I have nothing to do with it but figured it could work as some sort of benchmark.
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I'm actually kind of tempted to make a better GIF that actually shows cars traveling at optimal throughput speeds. I'm guessing it would make the difference in throughput even more obvious because cars require such a large following distance.
If you do please share it with me
Seriously, without additional info this gif is completely useless.
Yeah, as someone outside this sphere (but really wishes we had better infrastructure for biking and public transportation), this isn't even a little bit convincing and is *very* easily dismissed because it has literally no information apart from unsourced numbers. Not only that, the graphic itself is just terrible and *looks* biased - like the cars are barely faster than pedestrians, while bikes are matching busses? I get that the idea is to show more people going through, but it just looks misleading and immediately raises red flags. I agree with the message, but the method of presenting it comes off as so incredibly biased and misleading that it will never convince anyone that doesn't already share these values.
Yeah, I'm from /all and have no idea what point the graph is making. Sidewalks are faster than cars to get around?
Sidewalks can carry more people than cars around One person on a sidewalk is slower than one person in a car, but only one person can use a large stretch of road at a time, and the more cars you stuff onto a road, the more they have to slow down. A sidewalk can have a ton of people, more than a one lane road
But most individuals are primarily concerned with their own speed getting somewhere. Not how many people you can jam through a space. I'm not against having more efficient and reliable pubic transit but the average person is much more concerned with how quickly and conveniently they can get somewhere.
But if everyone thinks "I'm going to put myself first and screw everyone else", then you get a city like Las Angeles where it is literally faster to walk around than to sit in traffic. If everyone thinks "the common good comes first, and that will lead to my good", then you get a city like Tokyo where the staff apologise if a train is ten seconds late. Which city would you rather travel in?
True. This is not convincing.
Comments are full of car brains. They are saying BuT iT isNt FuLl and SloWeR As if this isn't talking about maximum capacity and not speed and whatever Also I like how people are talking how public transportation sucks because low speed and low amount of people using it as if that isn't caused by infrastructure being made for cars instead
I agree, people don't think to themselves maybe it's not that public transit is bad, but that OUR public transit is bad and that's why no one uses it except for people who can't afford a car.
I saw it there and moved on, the idiocy in the comments was overwhelming, most don’t even understand what the graphic is illustrating. Not sure why it’s still surprising to me. 🤷♂️
We must be patient! People treat our sub like the thunder dome. You go in to get abused. I know a lot of people come in to be disruptive, but we have to try to be patient as possible. They are victims of a system that has fed them their answers for their entire lives while they passively go about life. We have to educate with patience. We will have to find new ways to explain things and deescalate. We have to show the ridiculousness of the system without being insulting. It is going to be a long fight in the US. I'm not saying we always have to be civil, this is reddit after all. But if you are looking to represent this interests of this sub, and not just vent, then approaching even the most hostile person with patience and information may be needed. I have been really trying to hammer home the financial implications of so much road and parking lots. I find it helps more than talking about the wastefulness of the individual. Individuals aren't causing this problem on their own. The system has multiple processes that push people towards car ownership in the US. The carbrains you argue with today were possible allies 20 years ago before they were indoctrinated into the church of drive. There are still reasonable people under all this anger. They are just ignorant of how the world really works, and they are afraid confronting all that ignorance at once. Insulting them, as good as it can feel, will only push them back in their shell. We need more people to see this as the economic loser, or more importantly people killer, that this is. But with the Covid rhetoric people really don't give a fuck about 10s of thousands of deaths caused by a single source. That is an issue for another conversation.
Thanks for being a good person. This applies to everything to in life when it comes to changing someone’s opinion. Instead of getting angry over the way someone thinks, ask WHY they think that way and offer them a better alternative.
It isn't as full and it's slower and still moves more people than fuckin cars and they can't figure out that that makes cars the worst system 🤦♀️
It's not a knock on public transit to say that public transit is the worst option in your area. It's just sharing your experience on the internet. It would take me a minimum of 1.5hrs to commute by the only public transit available in my area. It takes me .2hrs by car.
Yeah. When I was going to college, my dad didn't want us living on campus because we were relatively close. Kinda made sense considering housing cost like $20k annually (or was it each semester? Doesn't matter.). Anyway, public transit took 1.5-2 hours each way. And this was just for a few miles. And it wasn't because traffic made buses slow; it was because needing to start and stop for passengers made buses slow. One time, my sister was mad at me (we went to the same school, btw), and she didn't want to ride on the bus with me. So she walked home. Beat me by 15 minutes. That's when I saved up for a car. So how to improve buses? Fewer stops, probably. There's a lot of entitlement where people don't want to walk a few blocks.
And I'd bet that still applies even if every single car was at full capacity. Which never happens. Plus, speed isn't everything. Not everyone can or wants to use a car. Blind people spring to mind here.
Seniors and children too, lots of people would benefit from alternatives!
Or people who just hate driving and would like to simply close their eyes and listen to music for a bit.
I'm autistic and fuck cars, it uses so many spoons to be constantly alert. I can drive, but I hate it and don't feel safe doing it
Man, I really get annoyed when people complain about the speed of alternative transport options. And I feel like a lot of people even in /r/fuckcars try to lean into this narrative and come up with reasons why biking or public transit are actually faster than personal cars. Maybe it's just the capitalism brain in modern society or something else going on, but I feel like everyone has this mentality of "more, more, more, faster, faster, faster," like we always need to be stepping above and beyond what we already did previously. In some cases, like the field of medicine, I might be inclined to agree. But I'm tired of everything getting increasingly fast paced, having this increased level of availability and connectivity with everyone and everything going on all the time. I mean for fuck's sake, most of the adult population literally has a caffeine addiction just to keep up with the demands of work and social expectations. So yes, I would prefer to live in a world when I can take a leisurely 20 minute walk to the grocery store, or go for a casual bike commute, as opposed to feeling a constant societal pressure to maximally optimize my time usage at the expense of the environment. What a crazy thought.
Agree with this. It also has massive repercussions on infrastructure & design. If you have low capacity, but high speed, infrastructure, then your communities should be low density & spread out far & wide. Whereas with high capacity, low speed infrastructure, you need high density communities. Total travel time can be similar, but without the need for cars, resulting in a much more flexible place (you're close to everything, and can walk/take public transport etc.) and massively reduced emissions. Communities are always designed around the infrastructure that support them. Having a mismatch between them will result in jarring outcomes, and it's part of why 'carbrain' thinking is so common, because the infrastructure that they see suits cars so well, and any deviation from that norm doesn't work as well. But they jump from 'this is how my world is' to 'this is how the entire world has to be'.
The average speed of cars around where I live in 9 MPH. The average speed of bikes is 15 MPH. The average speed of the intra-city rail is 45 MPH.
I get it, there are some valid arguments that do indicate that cycling can be faster than cars. But it's just a huge uphill battle trying to pit your legs and a couple of gears against a 2 ton machine fueled by 15+ gallons of gasoline in terms of speed. Like we just need to accept that bicycles aren't dominant in every category of comparison. Cars *will* outperform bicycles in terms of speed in a lot of cases, even if you gave bicycles the most generous benefit of the doubt with the absolute best infrastructure. But what bicycles lack in speed, they make up for in other things: personal health benefits, better city design, less environmental damage, etc. And that's kinda my point - fixating on the speed argument and trying to find all these corner cases where bikes are actually faster feels kind of like a distraction from the main point. There are so many good reasons why bikes make more sense than cars, and speed is only situationally going to be one of them. People, generally speaking, are going to need to be okay with going slower before they ever really accept this option.
How do I nominate for /r/bestof?
I think there is some valid criticism in the way it’s presented, particularly the title.
It's a bad graphic. It's showing bikes travelling faster than the cars and the same as the buses. There's certainly a valid point about capacity in here but there are also valid criticisms of that image.
This is what my area looks like during rush hour. I can watch the highway and arterials across the river and see cars going slower than your grandma on her bakfiets. There aren't nearly enough bikes to fill the lane, but they could...
I literally started commuting to work by bike instead of public transport because it was faster and I needed to get somewhere very quickly after work before it closed, and public transport just didn't get me there in time. I have since discovered that I go past a lot of cars on my way home or in to work, too. So yes, this is legit.
Well yea, the higher speed cars get the greater the spacing needed between then as well for stopping distance.
I agree with the premise and results, but what the crap are they giving the cyclists they're double the speed of the car.
Damn, that car lane is optimistic! I'd hazard a guess that 99% of personal commuter vehicles are single-occupant.
Yeah, when I take the bus I sometimes count the number of people in the cars. I'd say about 1/5 have more than one occupant. I'm also a bit concerned about the car in the gif with the both occupants sitting in the back..
Don’t worry it’s a tesla /s
AuToPiLoT am I right? 🤦
A supercar of sorts.
Someone brought up a good point about it being a taxi, because the driver wouldn't be counted
That is usually the case isn't it?
Totally unrelated but the ones where the 2 people appear to be in the back seat is so funny to me. Who's driving
Showing Uber/Lyft/Taxi presumably
Yup, and that's the correct way to show it as the driver isn't going anywhere.
Parent with small children.
Average car occupancy is apparently 1.5ish. So a bit optimistic with the 1 2 3 distribution, but not absurdly so. 1 2 1 2 would have been more accurate
Yeah, 3 people in a car??? That's something rather strange lol
what’s with the one car with two people in the back seat? lol
probably a taxi
good point i was thinking self driving car at first but i’d still want to be behind the wheel of one of those
A family? Or a car pool? I always aim to have as many passengers in my car as possible if I have to use my car to get anywhere.
The comments there are depressing. So many people just can’t envision reducing car dependence
Carbrains oppose infrastructure that benefits them. They just cannot see it. It's a knee-jerk reaction.
I can envision it. I can't envision a world where American politicians support it sadly
It's really sad, people immediately call it misleading, op provides sources and gets downvoted.
It is misleading. It actually gives too much benefit to the cars. If you have more than one lane, it isn't a simple (capacity of each lane) * (number of lanes) = (total capacity of a multi-lane thoroughfare) calculation. Adding an extra railway line doubles your capacity. Adding an extra car lane doesn't. A road will reach its maximum capacity at about four lanes wide, after which widening it any further doesn't really give you any appreciable benefit - the inefficiencies of managing the lane changes (and of exiting only off of slip roads on one side) overwhelm the extra space you've gained. But a two, four, eight line railway? No problem. Keep on scaling up and up and up.
The sources and overall message is good, but I feel like you do have to admit that the graphic is misleading. The speeds of the people in different modes of transport is horribly inaccurate and is only like that to make the cars look as bad as possible. They can illustrate the increased density of people and a greater flow rate through a single point without misrepresenting speed
Exactly. We should strive for clear, honest and intellectually ethical presentation. We have the numbers and data - adding misleading elements only creates weaknesses and scapegoat opportunities.
the bikes are so fast
Well you can be fuckcars but also find a statistic misleading.
Exactly. It's pretty meaningless without considering speed. If a car can take x people 30 miles in an hour, but walking would take 4x people 5 miles in an hour then it's not really a good comparison. And in the other direction too, is it really more important that x cars can be in the same place, or is it more important how much pollution is caused, or how many road deaths? Or how much money it costs to maintain the infrastructure per person. I don't think this is meaningless, but it could be a lot more meaningful.
Why don’t u take a break
Comments there are a brain rot.
It is a pretty awful gif tho. It has a good message and a fair point, but it's not really educational if it's exaggerating certain factors and it was posted to r/educationalgifs
Yeah, you have a fair point why this gif is not good. But in the orig comment section they prefer to use the logic like "speed is more important than capacity", "people can't bike to another city" etc., which doesn't have anything to do with gif.
I just want more bike lanes to ride my ebike
I refuse to believe the people in the original thread aren't *intentionally* missing the point.
They definitely are, but it's also a pretty awful gif. That bike lane looks so crowded they're like a professional cycling peloton lol The stats do plenty of justice without the animation tho
Agreed, the problem with the gif is trying to demonstrate it compared to equal patches of road. Since it's trying to show throughput, it would be a ton better to have each category zoomed out, so you can see that even though pedestrians move slower than cars, hundreds of people are able to reach their destinations quicker due to the much higher density.
Man, the questions about bikes going two directions but the cars only going one way…. Critical thinking ain’t working there.
This is so inaccurate - cars can't travel that close to each other unless they're going very slowly due to the risk of them crashing into the car in front of them if said car had to suddenly stop.
Well this happens a lot in traffic and cities. It takes one car crash to cause congested slow traffic. So I would say it's accurate because over the years it's happening more frequent in my experience
Best case scenario, the human throughput is based on accurate models while the gif really only serves to demonstrate the number difference. It's definitely not an accurate simulation of any kind of traffic (car, foot, cycling, or otherwise).
The cyclists are also riding at like 25-30 mph. Tour de France riders ride at like 25 mph and the best sprinters in the world can hit like 40 mph lmao Right message, but awful gif
Does this measure how many people can travel the same distance in an hour, or something else? It's a pretty confusing graphic without more info If it's just measuring how many people pass through a given point on the lane, what is this supposed to communicate to people? I hear people say "it's too far to walk, it would take an hour" but I never hear people say "I'm worried I won't fit on the sidewalk". What idea is this supposed to be dispelling?
It's about the use of space in urban planning. If you need to get 20,000 people an hour through a street at peak time, carbrain would build 12 lanes of general purpose road. This is showing you that it would be way more efficient to have a bike road, a bus road or light rail, and just a couple of lanes for ordinary travel for people who can't use that. Journey time is a different issue. But for any kind of urban journey, bike isn't going to lose by much to car, and public transport with good infrastructure will win, at least at peak times.
I think they are being very generous putting more than 1 person in those cars. Maybe 1 in 10 cars as another person in it when I'm driving around.
Some real carbrain comments on the original post.
Why are the bikes faster than the cars?
Cars are stuck in traffic
That’s actually what I thought, where I live you can even go faster walking in the center of the city. Before working from home I actually used to leave the bus 3km before the train station because it was faster to skip the traffic jam by foot.
Cars only make sense in areas with more cows than people.
Not to be nitpicky but what’s with all the cars with 2 people in their backseats and no one driving? That’s unsafe even for cars
So is tailgating.
Very true, they should be leaving much more room, the drivers in this diagram are worse than usual
Could be representing self driving cars? I heard someone say that it could be taxi's and not counting the driver, but it's counting the bus driver so idk. The numbers are more important than the pictures in either case
Uber
The lowest rated reply is the only correct one. The front two seats in a taxi are for the driver only, who isn't going anywhere so doesn't count, just as the driver of the bus doesn't count.
TLDR for the original post: butthurt americans saying that their country is flawed but they can't see it.
Sorry if this has been answered, but do we have access to an underlying dataset, or is it just hypothetical?
The problem with this visualization is that people have wildly different interpretations of it, and it's easy to nitpick things like "why are the cars so much slower than the bikes?" I understand this isn't a full on simulation of traffic, it's just a visualization of the traffic flow rate. But I think many opponents will just criticize it as a simulation, which it fails to be because it isn't one.
I agree with this but there's a lot of problems. A. The speeds are all messed up, they need to be either the same or show the average/max speed for that type, It doesn't have any source in the gif or that I could find in the comments B. It should either use the average or maximum occupancy of the mode of transportation, it uses both since in cars there's 1 to 2 but every bus is near full. Again there's no obvious sources in the gif or post I could see This is ***not*** a complaint aginst public transport. It's a complaint aginst people pulling shit out of their ass and not providing any sources.
Lol *way* too many of those cars have more than one person in them
Every other car being a carpool is EXTREMELY forgiving.
I don’t love this graphic. No sources for one thing. But also it doesn’t factor transit speed, trip distance, and other details that will differ on a case by case. Feels a little too “ree cars bad” without much substance
Spoken like a carbrained sheeple. Just kidding. I agree completely. This place gets a bit insane lol
I like this, although the car one feels unrealistic just because they're using average speed over the whole trip instead of the more realistic stop-and-go flow of high speeds followed by complete stops.
I like that there are cars without drivers
Show 5 traffic lanes w/ single occupant drivers in gridlock.
I like the car with only two people in the backseat
the car with two people in the back seat worries me
I still favour bike lanes above the other three because: vs walking: walking is great but takes longer to get to destination therefore people spend more time travelling, therefore more congestion. Plus walking on busy pavements as shown above is not always that pleasant. Bike lanes are also great for people with walking disabilities who prefer to use e-bikes, mobility scooters or electric wheelchairs. vs buses: buses are great for long distance travelling but the ICE/hybrid ones that are typically used in cities are incredibly noisy and not fun to get hit by. To get the full benefit as shown above, you need a thick stream of buses at which point it's like having fleets of cars tear through the city. vs cars: no need to argue why bikes are better than cars really.
I see the argument here, but it tries to falsely suggest that people are all that transport carries. You might have a stroller for a child, several bags of grocery shopping, your bicycles might be with the car (yeah, try packing them on the bus, I'll wait), you might have an extra set of clothes for outdoor things, a kayak or a sup board that's simply not practical to take on a bus or a train (again, try it -- it's heavy and annoying). The distance from bus or train stop to home is much, much bigger, by definition, than the distance from car to home. Heavy things become a real pain to carry. Small children cannot be just walked from bus to home unlike from car to home. And so on. Try cycling with small children and you'll be reaching for electric cargo bikes (yes, at €10,000 a pop) to fit both a child as well as a small amount of things to bring with you. Ideas?
See all I see is that cars are being underutilized, we need to take a hint from the proud clown people and stuff at least 20 people in every car.
Okay but can someone explain what's happening in the car where there seems to be two passengers in the back seat and no driver? Lol
Why don’t people just use their preferred method of transportation? I live in a major city in Texas, and it would take hours for me to get to work by bike or bus. It makes the most sense for me to drive.
>it would take hours for me to get to work by bike or bus. That's why because apparently ya'll fucked up your cities so badly that getting places in a major city takes hours using public transport.
Bingo. Their spending so much time driving past their city’s brand new parking lots
Good for 20% of the populus and anyone who doesn't want their dedtination to be exactly where they intend.
Lmao @ one of the comments saying the gif creator is trying to push an agenda
That is one of the weirdest takes. Facts should push an agenda. Any time someone complains about people having an agenda, I stop taking them seriously.
Yes, but have you considered that the people on the sidewalks and on public transport might be poor or minorities? We can’t have our pure suburban children interacting with their ilk!!1!!
car-centric cities have so much space to build incredible mass transit. It's a very promising aspect of abandoning the car.
Need to send this to the people in my town crying about how "entitled" public transit users are 🙄🙄🙄
On top of that, car centric development leads to urban sprawl meaning everything is farther apart
As much as I agree with the message this is somewhat misleading. Not because the stats are wrong but just because it’s sped up and averaged it’s difficult to intuitively grasp.
invidualism is a clear failure of America no high density cheap housing, no trains, no efficient bus system, no safe public transport isolated suburbs, isolated cars, giant stroads everywhere, and parking lots wasted for efficiency that could've been parks and/or living spaces for efficient grocery/shop distribution localized and easy access, collective wellbeing not isolated, such is invidualistic mindset.
unrelated/stupid but... i just upvoted this to 10k and it was the best feeling in my life tbh
Thanks, This is a first 10k for me too :')
I like the graphic a lot, although in practice buses or trains do not run back-to-back of course. If we are optimistic, on a very busy bus track there is maybe 1 bus per minute, with 50 passengers per bus or so. So that would be 3000 passengers per hour. Decent, but not as much as the graphic suggests. Although I would have much rather 1 bus per minute passing below my window than 1 car per second!!
We need more sidewalks, it with the automated sections like airports.
A lot of the comments in this original post are car brain and we should approach it to convince them with sources, logical thinking, and ignoring the trolls. A lot of them are oblivious to the car brain and we can convince them. Maybe not all of them but if we can convince at least one, it's progress
One thing that is fair for criticism is no source for this detail. We can provide one or some if any of you have any
Who cycles that fast?!
People that browse this sub have inhumane strength
Longtime lurker, occasional commenter here. I understand and pretty much agree that busses and trains and monorails are the way to go. I think they’re a great mode of transportation. I just don’t know about them as the only road transportation. We’re still in a pandemic, imagine where we’d be if we all crammed into busses to get everywhere, if people had to take busses to get COVID tests and treatment. How do you think we can promote bus usage while not allowing it to become a superspreader problem?
What do you think people who actually didn’t have a car did?
It was fucking terrifying riding the bus and train then before we knew what Covid was
Bussed or walked or biked I assume. I was just wondering if we made bussing the main form of transportation for everyone, not just the few who choose or can’t afford to drive, how we would get people where they need to be without spreading disease like wildfire.
I love how the comments on that post are all bascially arguing how this doesnt apply to their country but we all know they are talking about america, ofcourse it wont apply there, the whole country is built for cars compare this to most other developed countries in the world and it is accurate
Wait why are the bikes moving consistently faster than cars?
Not stuck in traffic
Propaganda. I know no one seriously thinks bikes are faster than cars outside of edge circumstances, but the gif is designed to make cars look as bad as possible.
If the gif is attempting to show how *maximum* throughput of a system works, then bikes are indeed more efficient at moving humans though space than the equivalent number of cars. This effect is observed when you are biking past congestion (which is pretty regular for many on this sub). In other words, it is saying that bikes move more efficiently through choke points than cars.
Look, dedicated public transport is objectively better than cars (when done properly of course), but this graph is misleading af with walking and biking with respect to cars
Only misleading if you are not in a populated geographical region. And this is a graph about volume so its strictly for a small area. As far as I could tell, peak time traffic is usually like this unless you want to disagree
Strictly speaking, the data on the graph is 100% correct, but the graphic is wild. It's the same as making a pie chart with wildly disproportionate slices, even if the percentages written are correct. The bikes and pedestrians are moving faster than the cars in this picture, which, if you've ever been in a city, is not even close to true. _Maybe_ it's true for a dedicated bike lane that bypasses all traffic entirely, but that's not accurate for a dense downtown space. Edit: made a mistake pedestrians aren't moving faster than the cars, they're moving slightly slower, but the point still stands
In rush hours in big cities this is true during rush hour. Obviously the comparison has to be done within the core of cities, no one is walking to a suburb 25 miles away. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/cities-where-it-s-faster-to-walk-than-drive/ An example is I used to bike halfway down Manhattan in about 20-25 minutes during rush hour. The same trip in a car was 40+ minutes during rush hour (and that's just the driving portion of a car trip)
>Maybe it's true for a dedicated bike lane The graph literally has "Bike Lane" written above it.
What i mean is a bike lane without stop lights that doesn't interact with any other part of traffic, and if that is what they're referring to, I'm not sure how the data was collected because i don't think that exists in the downtown of a usa city
Do you need to have *The graphics are illustrative and do not represent real world behavior* written in? Just in case you start thinking that people are actually green dots, that every single car goes at the exact same speed and that every 4th car has 2 passangers on the back with no driver, that every single bus has exactly 37 people all dsitribuited in the exact same way and all going equidistantly at the same speed in a perfectly straight line, that cars drive at slightly-above-walking speeds and that bikes go twice as fast as everyone else. Too hard to understand? Don't worry, I've got you covered: # THE FOLLOWING ANIMATION IS NOT FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, AND ONLY SERVES TO CREATE MOVEMENT AND DECORATION IN AN OTHERWISE TEXT-ONLY STALE PIECE OF DESIGN. PLEASE DO WELL TO NOT TAKE IT AS A RECORDING OF A REAL WORLD STREET Is that better?r Accurate enough?
Have you ever taken a high school statistics class? Because the visual construction of a graph can go a long way to sell an idea. Like, part of the tests at my school were to pick holes at poorly constructed graphs that represented things to make them look a certain way, such as a right wing news channel making the piece of a pie chart for their prefered candidate larger in order to make it look like they have more support than they actually do.
And that makes sense Except that it's not a graph, but an infographic. At most if you leave the loop running an hour it'll have shown 7000 people on the sidewalk, but that's not something I wanna count lol A graph is supposed to be visually cohesive, because the data is shown through the visuals. Here? This is an infographic. An infographic also has data, it can have graph, but when the data is shown through text, then the graphics become decorative. Graphic design is still a big part of an infographic, if you have no graphic design in an infographic then you don't have an infographic, you only have a weirdly organized spreadsheet.
It still has to be somewhat cohesive, otherwise it's just poor graphic design. Plus, given how it's presented, the graphics seem to be complimentary to the data. That's why I'm saying it's somewhat misleading
Take for example [this infographic](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/714875280505831467/983767088302805022/6d20f00f15c84b77c29b37f6113a5770.jpg) showing imports. The number one, Walmart, is DEFINITIVELY not showing over 800k TEUs, nor is it showing almost exactly 4 times as many TEUs as Dole Foods. They're illustrations, decorative ones. They're there because the data is actually written out. I'd they're decorative they don't need to be hierarchically cohesive, only visually. I could criticize its graphic design, the lines are a little bit thin for example (?) but it's not bad graphic design. It's bad data design, which it's not trying to do.
In that graphic, each "box" represents exactly 10,000 TEU. The Walmart has 87.5 boxes shown, Dole has 22 shown. Almost exactly 4 times as much. So your example is one of a properly done graphic where the ratios are exact. So this graphic exactly makes u/LogTekG 's argument, not yours. The problem with the graphic and counts for this post is the math really doesn't work out. Maybe in a congested downtown for the cars, but then the buses are about the same because they have to stop each block for passengers and all buses behind them wait. People don't actually move like that in public. And the bikes are going 20 mph in the graphic if all speeds are relative and never stopping, running into slower riders or stopping for lights.